


Inkstick (the Give My Bones Remix)

by feralphoenix



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Body Modification, Gen, Isolation, M/M, Needles, Pre-Relationship, Touch-Starved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-11
Updated: 2013-03-11
Packaged: 2017-12-04 23:51:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,364
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/716486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feralphoenix/pseuds/feralphoenix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>GT: Dirk what is this?</i>
  <br/>
  <i>TT: It’s my new ink.</i>
</p><p>Take one shaky step and bid your loneliness bye-bye; or, Dirk Strider, losing his rationality in fits and spurts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Inkstick (the Give My Bones Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [t34lbloods (perculious)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/perculious/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Inkstick](https://archiveofourown.org/works/564344) by [t34lbloods (perculious)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/perculious/pseuds/t34lbloods). 



> _(just him in his hall of mirrors_ – our last names on a wooden sign)

UU: please do consider investigating the links i’ve attached for yoU!  
UU: obvioUsly there isn’t any way for me to discoUrage yoU, bUt i’d hope that yoU will try to keep things as safe as possible.  
UU: it’s quite an Undertaking! :U  
TT: I’ll give them a run-over.  
TT: I appreciate both your concern and that you’re not going to play shoulder angel for me here.  
UU: heavens, no! u_u  
UU: it is a very personal choice to make, and i have no bUsiness whatsoever attempting to tread on groUnd where i have and deserve no aUthority.  
UU: yoUr body is yoUrs and yoUrs alone. yoUr temple, one might even say. :U  
UU: therefore, whatever yoU choose to do with it is yoUr own decision.  
UU: within reason, of coUrse. u~u  
TT: Of course.  
TT: A tattoo is reasonable enough, although I’ll have to improvise a little bit with the execution method here.  
TT: Let’s face it, if I were not in fact reasonably certain that even a non-professional like me can manage to work out a stick-and-poke, I wouldn’t bother.  
TT: I mean, I’m gonna need this arm working in the future.  
UU: and *that* is the part that concerns me!  
TT: Which part?  
UU: please don’t take offense, dirk, bUt…  
UU: yoU have been known to display a certain disregard for yoUr own well-being when it comes to yoUr goals.  
UU: and precisely becaUse i’m in… what we can call a Unique position to empathize, i am concerned for yoU!  
TT: Fair enough.  
TT: But I also trust that because you do know how I feel,  
TT: You are going to be able to let me do this.  
TT: I am a guy at the end of a shoddily constructed and rapidly fraying rope here.  
UU: u_u  
TT: You don’t have to watch if you have a thing about needles.  
UU: thank yoU, lovely! ^u^ thoUgh yoU needn’t worry about that, i think.  
UU: now *please* do all the research before yoU embark on yoUr joUrney of intrepid body modification.  
TT: Aight.

 

It took approximately fourteen years and five months for Dirk Strider to reach his limit.

His world was a concrete spire over an endless ocean. His days were filled with water, salt, baking sun, and Internet access. He practiced his swordsmanship alone on the roof. He fished over the edge of the apartment or out the window. He built robots, programmed them, and set them to fight each other—or him—to the death. He composed sick rhymes and drew ironic artwork. He pieced together snapshots of the last days of his race using what was left of the human Internet and the Wayback Machine. He watched movies, read his bro’s letters, and spent several hours each day on Pesterchum.

But in the end there was only so much that a guy could do to not acrobatically pirouette right the fuck off the handle when the only people he’d ever known in his life were separated from him spatially, temporally, and universally.

Roxy had it pretty tough too, and it couldn’t be easy to be left to your own devices with somebody whose face you wanted nothing more than to claw off like the anonymous alien twins—Dirk fully intended to understand and appreciate that. Jake had been sharing Hellmurder Island with a bunch of animals for years since his grandma’s death. And maybe Jane couldn’t fully appreciate her pretty suburban social life, but he’d never in a million fucking years wish for her to suffer a solitary existence like his or the others’. None of them had chosen their own lot. A kid didn’t get to determine what environment it would grow up in, on principle. Feeling resentment towards anyone, feeling anxious and miserable and sorry for himself, would not be rational or mature. Dirk knew this. He told it to himself routinely—mechanically—to wrestle the lid shut whenever irrational and immature stirrings frequented the interior of his skull.

But the fact of the matter was still that Dirk had spent fourteen years and five months in a concrete box, and had never in waking memory encountered another living being face to face before.

It was like a chronic disease—he’d be going about his business, distracted by programming or chatting, and then a flare-up would sneak up on him: Moroseness dragging at his throat and his ribs, a crawling sensation at the nape of his neck that made him want to tear at his skin.

He dreamed about inexplicable flashes of purple and black, and woke up with a desire for action and exertion too big for the cage he lived in.

The cabin fever—or periodic, temporary insanity—whatever it was—had stolen up on him slow and steady like a tidal wave in a storm, and he’d somehow never caught wind of it. Even when Dirk paged through his memories, poring over murky recollections for clues, there was no sudden turn for the unbearable in his isolation that he could remember.

He paced the apartment like the way lions and tigers did in zoo enclosures on old Youtube videos. The way he imagined that the Condescension’s human lab rats had, in their sterilized cages. He swallowed nausea, frustration, and impatience because coolkids kept a fucking lid on that kind of bullshit, and drafted plans for a rocket board.

Halfway through preparing the materials, a calm voice in the back of his mind said that it wouldn’t matter if he flew away and never looked back, even if he found an inexhaustible fuel source, even if his syllabus could fit all his belongings and he could make the electronics work outside.

Dirk let his hands come to a rest on the bench. He asked himself why that was.

Because in all the wide world, he and Roxy were the only humans left, his mind answered, like it was the solution to a long mathematical proof.

“Ah,” Dirk said out loud, tilting his head to one side.

Things came into focus that perhaps should have been obvious for a long time.

The nameless raging thing swelled in the dark corners of his insides.

 

Dirk shelved his plans and spent the rest of the day watching movies, slouched forward on the old couch with his elbows digging into his knees.

Entertainment was the furthest thing from his mind—and besides, he’d already dissected the plots of all of the films in his younger years, over chats with Roxy, an unfiltered stream of melded meta and fanfiction spun by the both of them. So too was his usual pet project of uncovering history, peeling back the layers of authorial opinion and intent to get to what a movie had to say about the time period in which it was created.

No, that day Dirk only had eyes for the way that people acted around each other. How they listened to what other people had to say with their ears and their bodies too. How their emotions came out on their faces, in the ways their muscles tensed. How they moved in packs, and how their behavior differed then from how they acted alone.

How they touched each other.

Dirk knew what it felt like when he touched his own body. He also knew that touching himself directly felt different from touching his body using an object, and from an object touching him. Therefore, it was reasonable to expect that being touched by another person would feel different from touching himself as well.

It was perhaps a little unfair for his brain to come up with this thesis while he was trying to dissect all the meanings of interpersonal touch, the ramifications and the variations. It was extremely obvious to think, and therefore felt impossibly revelatory.

Asking Jane or Jake for confirmation was technically an option. It was also completely out of the question. He didn’t need Jane fussing over him, and definitely didn’t need Jake getting whatever strange ideas Jake would get if Dirk started asking about touching. He might have been all right with asking Roxy—Roxy would understand—or even asking UU, but neither of them would know what it felt like to be touched by a human either.

Dirk narrowed his eyes at the big-screen TV as movie stars in some comedy talked at each other over a kitchen counter.

He thought that maybe, even if someone were around to touch him, he wouldn’t like it.

He entertained the warring what-ifs until the end credits rolled, then left the DVD menu on and went to the roof.

 

Dirk Strider went swimming for the first time in a while.

The empty cityscape under the waves was as surreal as ever, a weird illusion that made sense memories of his violet dreams float up to the surface of his consciousness.

The old concrete bones of his species were feathered with patches of algae that looked soft but would feel slimy if he swam over to run his fingers across them. Aquatic life that resembled nothing in the bright photographs on Wikipedia sometimes drifted in and out of the windows, like hollow eye sockets of an empty skull. Everything was patterned with twisting patterns of pale light, reflections off the waves like translucent scarves or streamers. An intangible caress.

It was a phrase that stuck in Dirk’s head. At thirteen he might have saved it to rap it out, but now at fourteen it was a bullet ricocheting around his cranium and destroying his logic, his rationality, leaving bloody trails of fear and longing in its wake.

He thought about how over two hundred years ago, people had lived their paltry lives and done their completely unremarkable work in these buildings, in an era when they’d all been above water. The seafloor—what had been the ground, once—was too deep to be visible to the naked eye.

When he was a kid, thinking of it in terms of history and secrets hidden under the ocean brine, it had filled him with a sense of terrible sweeping grandeur. Now, thinking about the lives, he felt like a fucking relic.

Dirk faced the surface and let all his breath out through his nose, watching the bubbles spiral up, iridescent and fragile. He hung there for a few moments with the salt water stinging at him, and then he kicked up to put his head above the surface.

 

He put his bro’s movies in and went straight to the director’s interviews. Let it never be insinuated that Dirk Strider was something other than a sad, masochistic fuck.

Watching Dave Strider was not quite like watching people in Hollywood blockbusters. It wasn’t quite like watching poorly-shot home videos on Youtube, either. Part of this was because Dave Strider was the epitome of cool, and hardly emoted other than the raise of a pale brow or a curve of the lips, any betrayal of emotion in his eyes shielded by his trademark shades. Part of this was because the dramatis personae of Hollywood blockbusters and poorly-shot home videos on Youtube did not have the same jawline, the same eyebrows, the same mouth and almost the same ridiculous hair as Dirk himself.

On the other side of the screen, Dave answered questions about his Moive. Dirk let the words flow by, only registering tone and cadence. Their accents were different, and that had always bothered him: Dave had lived and died surrounded by people with the same drawl, the same dialect. Dirk had learned pronunciation from movies. He’d never have the opportunity to hear Dave Strider and a thousand dead Texans speak all the words in the English language. No matter how many times he repeated a sentence after his brother’s film ghost, the syllables came out clipped.

Dirk’s voice was unremarkable. It had cobbled together too much of too many people’s echoes to stand out amongst them. His speech was Atlantean, anonymous.

He’d always done his best to follow the instructions that his brother had left in all the letters. He’d studied swordsmanship and history and robotics, lifted the legacy of a dead race onto his shoulders and inherited their grudge against their alien murderess with it. He believed that his brother, cut down in his prime in an attempt to stand up for justice, would be proud of his progress.

But what would life be like if Dirk had landed in the 1990s like Jane and Jake, if he and Dave Strider had ever had to share living space? How different would Dirk have grown up then? The main thing that had always hung over his connection to Dave was the not knowing—not being sure that his brother would actually be proud, or if it was just Dirk’s own hubris making him believe so.

The prospect of knowing was awful, now that Dirk was considering it. Brothers in a concrete apartment, maybe their relationship would have festered with frustration and insecurity. Maybe Dave, alive, would have been as distant as the stars, yet kept Dirk jumping after him. The death of a thousand cuts, each one salted with hopeless sword fights, as one-sided as Dirk’s actual to-the-death brawls with his own robots. The theory was reasonable enough: Stick a couple of stone-faced assholes in close quarters, watch things implode if Dirk’s marble mask is nothing but.

Then again, it could be the opposite. A relationship more like Jane’s with her dad: A lot of mutual frustration during the rough patches, but affection also, and copious reassurances of fraternal pride.

Dave Strider’s letters were brusque, but dissecting the sentences Dirk had thought that they still held caring. He’d never know for sure, but now that he’d reached his limit of solitude, now that he itched to dissect the science of human touch, that closed-off possibility—like a flipped coin falling through endless void, never to land—burned.

He thought that he might have been able to endure getting the short end of the stick if only for crumbs of approval: A douchey coolkid half-smile, an upraised thumb, a warm hand on his back, a silent _you did good._

Not only would he never receive those things from his brother, he might never receive them from anyone. Hazards of raising himself on Strider Island, amidst the sea of nothingness. Flotsam drifting on the planet’s desiccated body, connected to nothing at all.

Dirk watched all the interviews back to back. He shut off his television, cleaned his face of tears and snot, drank two glasses of water to stave off dehydration headaches, and took a shower. Trying to shut his mind off was useless, so he let it clack along on its hamster wheels. He handed his programming project over to the auto-responder for the night—at least someone in Chez Strider might as well be pleased—and sunk into his desk chair to marathon My Little Pony. It might, at least, provide some distraction.

(The ruse was not, it happened, a sufficient distaction in the least. He had hit a new low if not even Rainbow Dash in all her spunkiness could offer no help.)

Restless, mind unhinging, he opened up Pesterchum and flipped through his chumroll. Nothing from Jane or from Roxy. Nothing from the thoroughly unpleasant, anonymous brother, though he might have been a nice diversion, nastiness reaching so far back through humor that it recommenced nastiness and comically serious reactions to provocation. The sister was online but had not sent him any messages, most likely preoccupied with Roxy or with Jane. Dirk did not begrudge them her company.

Jake, though.

Dirk’s patience for feelings was getting thin, and at least he didn’t have to worry about the auto-responder leaping into the open chat window, so he scrolled down lines of excited green text, a predictable enthusiastic capital scrolling into reams of lowercase letters, only interrupted by end punctuation. Dead gods only knew why he found that typing style endearing.

He stopped, frowned. Scrolled back up, line by line, until he found what had put up a flag of interest like a little red exclamation point in the back of his cranium.

When we finally meet face to face i am going to give you such the biggest bear hug, Jake had typed. We shall embrace jocularly as bros!

Something that was mostly howl or roar—something far too bestial for quaint little nouns like scream—clawed its way up Dirk’s throat, trying to force its way out and all that had built up in him his whole life with it. He swallowed it down, leaned forward with palms stretched flat on the desktop, hyperventilated. It felt as though letting the sound free would cause every cell in his entire body to spontaneously detonate.

Fifteen minutes later, shaking and sweaty with black spots swirling across his vision, Dirk deliberately closed the chat window with Jake and selected UU’s handle from his chumroll.

He didn’t think about the words, but he knew as he typed them that they were wholly sincere.

I’m thinking of getting a tattoo.

 

Dirk Strider diligently completed his homework. He did his research. He flipped through countless cached web pages on the art of the stick-and-poke and how to make one relatively sanitary, drew up separate lists of dos and don’ts and highlighted the communal points between them. UU would probably be gratified, he thought, though he didn’t feel like he had to check in with her repeatedly during the process.

He dug up the needle, resisted the urge to use one from the emergency sewing kit his brother had left for him. He double-checked the dead Internet’s recommendations while choosing thread, and spent the better part of an hour finding an instrument that would work just right as the stick. He cleared space in the bathroom, sanitized the counter and the mirror, and finally sat down to draw the tattoo on his arm.

Tattoos were, according to Dirk’s research, often used as symbols: cultural, personal. He’d been drawing Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff since he could hold a stylus, but he took his time with every contour, every fragment of simulated jpeg artifacting. This was not just an artistic statement: It had to be a séance, it had to be alchemy, necromancy. The tethers he had to other people were all made out of floss, and as a net to keep Dirk from going insane alone but for fragments of himself he’d set up as mirrors, that wasn’t good enough. He needed something stronger, something tangible. All he could think was to etch proof that Dave Strider had existed into his own skin.

Dirk disinfected everything, again, and braced himself in front of the mirror with optimal light. He started to poke the needle into his skin, along the lowest lines of ink.

It hurt. He’d more or less expected that. It wasn’t an issue. He’d had too many of his own robots coming for his throat, half-killed himself on the concrete of the roof, and risked drowning in the damn ocean far too many times to flinch at a little pain.

Seven pokes in and blood started to well up. He’d expected that, too, and wiped the little dots of red away before Hella Jeff could get too smeared.

It took several minutes for Dirk to register the pain compounding, swelling, getting angrier and more visceral than he had calculated in the back of his head. His breathing was getting a little sharp. Gooseflesh rose and eased and rose again along his forearms. He felt some of the pokes along the back of his neck and along his ribs.

He imagined his brother holding the stick. He imagined the voice of Dave Strider, that perfect coolkid drawl, telling him to just stay still and tough it the fuck out, because what kind of Strider couldn’t handle a little sick burn. He imagined the words harsh, derisive, an order; he imagined them again, joking and gentle, a veiled offer of rest.

No, he wouldn’t stop in the middle. He had to do it all at once, or it wouldn’t work. Exorcism failure. The ghost would stay in the machine, maybe forever, and Dirk would go right the fuck out of his nut instead of being able to bear it longer. He could either stand being connected to people or he couldn’t. This wasn’t something he could bear to do halfway.

He closed his eyes on the way to dipping the needle back into the ink, and imagined a hand passing over his hair, warm, alien. He believed in it as hard as he could, like a kid trying to resurrect Tinkerbell, but his brain pointed out that he could never accurately reproduce a sensation he’d never experienced. He’d already thought too much about the difference between someone else touching him and touching himself for that. The phantom sensation kept its mask on.

For fuck’s sake. He didn’t even know what Dave would think of this—his temporally-displaced brother hurting himself out of an attack of the touch-starved crazies and what even Dirk could tell was a twisted sense of love and loyalty. If he’d be proud or sad or just weirded the fuck out. They weren’t even real goddamn brothers; that was not how the convoluted whims of ectobiology had spun the DNA they shared. Dirk needed to stop asking himself questions. It was too late to turn back anyway.

About halfway through the tattoo his whole arm felt like it was boiling, the raw angry skin thumping. Dirk was brought out of the zone at the realization that the beat of pain in the arm was perfectly in time with the beat of his cock.

 _This is a new low even for me,_ Dirk thought, and it was funny and he hated himself for it in equal measure. He didn’t know if it was the pain that was turning him on or the chameleon fantasy of Dave (cruel, gentle, stern) applying the tattoo to mark him, claim him, define him as little brother and as possession. He’d never been particularly interested in painplay, or incest fantasies for that matter, but he spent enough time trawling furAffinity for ironic and non-ironic purposes and beat it to enough fetish porn as it was. It was ironic for one of the last scraps of humanity to be a depraved example, which was part of why Dirk accepted his own kinks with good humor instead of fussing over them; that did make it hard to decipher what on earth was giving him this boner in particular.

Dirk persisted. He had to stop several times to swab away blood, or to shake his head and blink to keep his vision from blurring. Almost all the way finished with the tattoo, the pain was finally beginning to get to him: The whole right side of his body felt like it was underwater, weightless and swaying; the left side swung from prickles to pain in waves. His hard-on wasn’t abating either, despite all the pain, which was fucking up his breathing and his concentration. He might have just unbuttoned his jeans and taken care of that, but he did not need to be noodle-limbed with dopamine and oxytocin while tattooing himself, and really did not need sweat in all the little inky punctures.

He imagined Dave nodding, just a little, in approval at his devotion to task. He thought about telling his friends about the tattoo, just passing it off as a cool thing, about being able to report to UU that things had gone down just fine. He imagined them as spectators, lighthearted talk as a distraction from the pain. Thinking of Jake watching him mark himself made his stomach cramp and his dick wet.

A brief vision passed behind Dirk’s eyes of what it might be like to watch Jake tattoo himself—or even to put his own mark on Jake’s body. A low noise guttered in the back of his throat, and he had to clench his hands to keep them from shaking.

 _Things to not mention to the auto-responder,_ Dirk decided.

He dotted the points of Hella Jeff’s hair and finally set the needle down.

When Dirk wiped his arm down with disinfectant, something like a low roar half-emerged from his throat, pain disengaging his ability to shut himself up. But it wasn’t the kind of anguished howl-scream that the cabin fever had felt like. He had—for now—successfully lanced that boil. He was branded. He was an anchored man.

 

With his arm bandaged and his whole body prickly and aching, Dirk lay on his back on the bed. He allowed his eyes to drift closed. His cock was still straining, built-up semen waiting to be expelled, heavy across his stomach: He let it lie. Breathing was more important, now.

He’d checked his temperature after he taped his fresh tattoo up. The old thermometer had reported him as having a fever of three degrees, which wasn’t all that surprising. He was really fucked up on pain, and the snarls the pain had put in his body’s chemistry. His arm itched like fuck, and he had a nagging urge to go get his sword and chop it right off.

Amputation would solve exactly nothing. Dirk twisted, trying to find a more comfortable way to lie. He gave up in short order and returned to lying on his back; having an arm underneath him was uncomfortable, having his swollen dick underneath him would be more so, and lying on his bandaged arm was utterly out of the question. He didn’t need an extra beehive of pain atop the tattoo.

Instead he reached down between his legs with his left hand, cupping his dick and his balls. The touch was an instant relief. He just held himself, not moving his fingers. Jerking off roughly, the way he liked to fantasize, would be too rough on the rest of his body. And besides, his head was too jumbled and confused with too many different things to pull up any one uninterrupted fantasy. This was about comfort. He’d often done the same, tucked a hand between his legs while resting in bed, when he’d been ill before. It wasn’t really sexual at all.

Dirk breathed deeply, counting so that inhale and exhale were the same length. He ran his fingers over the shaft of himself in a lazy stroke. His balls were cramping, but at least that was a pleasurable kind of ache, and not the kind that made him want to lop off a limb to get away from the feeling.

When he thought about his brother now, drawing lazy finger patterns on his stomach and his penis, the specter of Dave was only kind. He didn’t smile, didn’t reach out to touch Dirk even though Dirk yearned for that warm hand on his head, but he nodded. Quiet acknowledgement, approval, pride even. Dirk had connected them. He thought of Dave accepting that, whether or not his brother would really understand.

The head was getting slippery with precome. The warm sensation of his fingers coaxed the shuddering rest of him to relax, pleasure fighting a quiet war with pain. He thought of what Jane would say whenever she found out. She’d scold him, probably nag to make sure that he had taken every precaution for safety, and generally tell him that he had been stupid, all in words transparent with worry. It would be nice, he thought, rocking the palm of his hand against the head of his dick. This had been reckless, and stupid. There was nothing for him to get offended about, and he could stand to have her worry wasted on him.

Roxy would probably treat the whole episode like a colossal joke, Dirk thought, rubbing the length of his dick and tracing wet spirals over his balls with his middle finger. And all the while she’d likely see right through him. Worrying in her own way, and coping with the worry her own way. She wouldn’t chastise, and wouldn’t disapprove. Her understanding would be harder to bear, but he needed it too.

UU, he needed to message sometime in the next forty-eight hours, and let her know that he was fine and his arm not gangrenous or any similar shit.

He curled his hand around himself, sliding it up and down his erection, still too leisurely to be considered pumping. And he imagined them in proximity to him, one by one: Jane handing him things, checking his bandages; Roxy affording hugs; UU’s mysterious alien claws carding through his hair, cooler than human flesh, warmer than a robot. His face felt hot; his eyes hurt. His breath was starting to rush, but still his body wasn’t curling in on itself with arousal.

Jake.

He wanted Jake to be innocently impressed, he wanted Jake to understand perfectly, he wanted Jake to be aroused, he wanted Jake to mark him too, he wanted Jake to _want_ to be marked, he wanted—too much. He wanted Jake to be here. He wanted Jake to hold his hand, to lie on top of him, moving like rough silk, sensuous instead of sexual, a Hollywood love scene instead of a lurid porno. He wanted Jake’s mouth on his, wanted Jake’s mouth on his dick.

His balls spasmed under his fingers, his cock thumped, and he came hot and white against his stomach. Dirk let out a breath. He was getting dangerously sweaty and his eyes were damp.

He wiped his hand off on his thigh, pushed himself up, and walked back to the bathroom. He ran the shower, held a towel underneath the spray, and wiped his whole body down.

On an afterthought, he put clothes on and unwrapped his shoulder. The tattoo was going to swell up and get nasty soon, so he wouldn’t have another chance for a while.

Dirk scooped up a camera and snapped a quick selfie. He plugged it into the USB port on his computer, rewrapped his shoulder, and sat down to Pesterchum.

 

TT: Did you get the picture I sent you?  
GT: Whats this now?  
TT: Check your e-mail.  
GT: ...  
GT: Dirk what is this?  
TT: It’s my new ink.  
GT: Do you mean to tell me that this is a recent and accurate picture of the arm of my best bro dirk strider?  
TT: I did it today, so yeah.  
GT: What do you mean you did it? Are you telling me that you drew this on your own arm?  
TT: Drew it and then stuck an inked needle in it. Thereby creating the miracle known as a tattoo.  
GT: Jeepers dirk!  
TT: What do you think?  
GT: Well for starters im impressed! That is a spiffing image of your bros best work it looks expertly done!  
TT: It’s not hard to draw Hella Jeff. That’s kind of the point of the franchise.  
GT: What did he say?  
TT: Who?  
GT: Your bro of course! The very creator of the visage adorning your very manly i might add arm!!  
TT: Oh.  
TT: I guess I haven’t told him.  
GT: He certainly will have a surprise waiting for him! I can hardly believe it myself!  
GT: Its really permanent?  
TT: I imagine at some point after I die when my skin starts to rot it’ll fade.  
TT: But until then, yes.  
GT: Well despite that macabre aside i am still impressed.  
GT: Didnt it hurt?  
TT: Sort of.  
TT: I didn’t really mind.  
GT: My goodness dirk it will never cease to amaze me the things you can take in stride.  
GT: I suppose it’s to be expected. You are after all a strider!  
GT: *Winks meaningfully*  
TT: Good thing you winked. Otherwise that would have flown right over my head.  
GT: Ok i know youre being sarcastic as usual but i dont care.  
GT: This is incredible. How did you learn how to tattoo?  
TT: I didn’t learn anything. I just figured it out. It’s not hard.  
GT: You always say that about things that are veri fucking fiably difficult!!  
GT: I dont believe your unflappable facade. I think it must have taken some work to learn how to build robots and tattoo yourself and you just want me to think youre some mr do everything cool guy.  
TT: If that’s what you want to think.  
GT: Im onto you strider.  
TT: Look, it’s really not hard. You’re free to make up whatever fantasies about me and robots you want, but it’s just objectively not difficult to do a tattoo. You just dip a needle in ink and stick it in.  
TT: Just sticking it in isn’t hard, Jake.  
GT: Then how come everyone doesnt do it??  
TT: I don’t know. Obviously I thought it was a pretty great idea.  
GT: But jiminy christmas people pay lots of money for good tattoos! You could do it as a job!  
TT: I highly doubt anyone would pay money to put Hella Jeff on their body permanently.  
TT: Except my bro, maybe.  
TT: But probably not. That would be kind of lame.  
TT: Since he’s already famous for SBAHJ. It would make him look a little douchey.  
TT: For me it’s just cool.  
GT: Im serious though. Have you ever done it for anyone else?  
TT: Nah. This is the first one I’ve done.  
GT: You should! Maybe not hella jeff although you know my admiration of your bros work remains glowing as ever.  
GT: What else can you draw?  
TT: Whatever you want.  
GT: *coughs in surprise*  
GT: Not for me dirk!  
TT: Is coughing really a thing people do when they’re surprised?  
GT: You should get a friend of yours to let you try it out. Just to practice your skills.  
GT: Im serious this could be a lucrative career path.  
GT: Although i suppose youll end up rich and famous yourself one day from your robots!  
GT: What am i saying you and roxy are the most talented people i know. You could do anything.  
TT: Why not you?  
TT: I don’t have any better friends.  
GT: *Goes red!!*  
GT: Dirk that means a lot to me but i dont know.  
GT: I mean the obvious obstacle is this blasted large ocean between us.  
GT: Unless you can sendinistrate a tattoo onto me!  
TT: Sendificate. I don’t think that technology exists, no.  
TT: I suppose I could program a robot to do it. But that would be a lot of effort for a robot with a pretty small range of usefulness.  
TT: Unless you can think of any other use for a robot that looks like me and has very dexterous fingers that I can program to move in specific ways.  
GT: I wouldnt want to put you to all that trouble just for my sake.  
GT: What am I saying. I dont even want a tattoo!  
GT: I mean what would I even get?  
TT: That’s up to you. It’s a very personal decision.  
TT: You’re right, though. It would probably be better in person.  
TT: I wouldn’t want anything to go wrong.  
GT: Im sure any robot you made would do the job just smashingly!  
TT: Yeah but there are some things it’s just better to do in person.  
TT: Just out of curiosity, what would you want me to draw?  
TT: If I were there.  
TT: Which will probably never happen due to the aforementioned blasted ocean.  
TT: Shit’s like the fuckin’ black belt master of keeping us apart.  
TT: Trained for years in a secret mountain dojo in the art of keeping adolescent boys away from each other.  
TT: If our fingertips ever touch it has to turn in its belt and commit ritual suicide.  
GT: Gee whillikers dirk i dont even know.  
GT: Ive never thought about it.  
GT: Probably something from some movie. But which one??  
GT: There are simply too many options to choose from!  
TT: What’s your favorite?  
GT: You cant just ask a man a question like that!  
GT: Ill be here deliberating for days!!  
TT: Ok, ok. Don’t break anything.  
TT: You like my bro’s movies, right?  
GT: What did i just tell you. Of course i do!  
GT: Ill admit i don’t always quite understand whats going on but thats not the point of a movie now is it.  
GT: Theyre plenty enjoyable!  
GT: Even riveting!  
TT: Well, I have the most practice drawing that shit. For obvious reasons.  
TT: I could do Hella Jeff for you.  
GT: I wouldnt want the exact same tattoo as you dirk. An adventurer like myself has to show his rugged individuality you know.  
GT: Hmm.  
GT: Well blast it why not have sweet bro? After all the movies are a depiction of a particularly strong broship.  
GT: Much like the one a certain rugged adventurer shares with a certain mysterious robot builder who has recently revealed a talent for ink based art!  
TT: Wow, that’s pretty much the lamest way you could possibly have phrased that.  
TT: But yeah, I could do that for you.  
TT: Easily.  
GT: Wait slow down dirk.  
GT: This is all hypothetical right?  
GT: I mean youre not actually going to tattoo me.  
TT: Of course not. As we’ve already discussed, that would be impractical.  
TT: I was just curious.  
TT: If we do ever meet up though, I’d be happy to. Just let me know.  
GT: Thats very kind of you!  
GT: Well of course it is youre always obliging.  
TT: Just what bros do.  
GT: Speaking of tattoos have you ever seen the movie memento?  
GT: I just saw it yesterday and wow what a doozy!  
GT: I just had an idea! You could tattoo me with something i might otherwise forget.  
GT: Like a treasure map or my wifes birthday or something really important like that.  
GT: Or maybe all four of our pesterchum handles! Then if i woke up with no memory i could contact you and jane and roxy. Otherwise id be sunk.  
TT: Yeah. Let’s just stick to Sweet Bro.  
TT: But good ideas Jake.


End file.
